


Et In Arcadia Ego Sum: X-Files Season 6, "Arcadia"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [33]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Arcadia - Freeform, F/M, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 14:22:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3071399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder





	Et In Arcadia Ego Sum: X-Files Season 6, "Arcadia"

  * I love the smell of fresh meta in the morning.

So, “Arcadia.” I always meant to get back to this episode, and allthewayfrombelfast has obliged by requesting meta on this episode for her birthday. Here we go!

So, basically, I’m going to talk about the two things in this episode that fascinate me the most: the way this episode comments on the Mulder/Scully relationship, and the way it contributes to and expands the illustrious tradition of American horror stories about apparently perfect towns with apparently perfect families which conceal some terrifying and usually homicidal secret. I’m putting in a cut tag cause I guarantee this will get long. Beware all ye who enter here!

"Arcadia" was one of the few Season 6 episodes that I was truly excited about. This is partly because of the M/S stuff, which contains some golden moments for them, but probably more because it’s such a perfect expression of the paranoia and general queasiness with which I too am inspired when I contemplate the American veneration of the single family home, the nuclear family, and the homogenized and conformist communities expressly created—usually (in the 1990s, at any rate) by the white and wealthy—for the incubation and protection of such perfect homes and families. The Falls At Arcadia is a quintessential example of a particularly obnoxious form of this phenomenon: the gated community. And although the monster part of this plot is pretty basic and the ‘explanation’ extremely problematic and some of the jokes about M&S "playing house" grate, I just love all the ways, large and small, that this episode just skewers everything that the gated community was, is, and still stands for.

I alluded to the great American tradition of narratives about perfect towns concealing dark secrets. Mulder does the same in their first dinner date at the Schroeders: “Every community has its dark underbelly.” Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is probably the great-grandmother of all such tales; later iterations include the classic  _Twilight Zone_ episode “It’s A Good Life” Stephen Spielberg’s classic 80s horror film  _Poltergeist,_ and the recent and apparently not especially successful horror film  _The Purge,_ whose plot, I have sworn I will lose no opportunity to state, was completely ripped off from the classic  _Star Trek_ episode “Return of the Archons.” I should also mention Gloria Naylor’s novel  _Linden Hills,_ in which she imagines an African-American version of the kind of planned Yuppie gated community we see in “Arcadia,” only it’s actually a modern updating of Dante’s ten circles of hell.

In all of these examples, a town where everything is apparently safe, happy, and normal is gradually revealed to be founded on something which is slowly killing them, both literally and psychically. What kind of community it is changes with the times; and in fact this set of examples gives you a little capsule history of how the American Dream has mutated over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “The Lottery” is set in a rural farming village which has apparently been around for many, many generations and its secret is that its inhabitants believe in and accept the idea that in order for their crops to grow and for everything to be OK in general, they need to kill one member of the community every year. This member is selected at random in a lottery on June 27, and stoned to death by all the other members. Although it’s based on old anthropological ideas about fertility rituals, there is also obviously a reference to the complicity of ‘ordinary Germans’ in the Holocaust; and critiquing the ways in whcih we purchase our own safety and prosperity with the blood and tears of other people is a fairly common move in many literatures. But there does seem to be something specifically American to me in how normalized the whole lottery process is. The suppression of all strong emotion, the way people still try to be blandly positive and gently remonstrative in the face of the victim’s mounting terror, the preservation of the smile and the upbeat outlook through it all—that does seem to me to mark the beginning of a peculiarly American phemomenon. What’s different about us is not that we are any less oppressed by the conformity imposed by a materialistic and consumerist culture, but that we genuinely seem to enjoy our own subjugation. I recently was forced to watch  _The Lego Movie,_ and watching the sequence in which Emmet’s little identically designed Lego builder friends bang away at their construction project in unison while belting out “EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!” reminded me strongly of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film  _Metropolis,_ in which the rich enjoy beauty and leisure on the surface while the workers are all condemned to a dehumanized and mechanical existence underground. I thought, well, that’s America: whistle while you work, smile while your humanity is being sucked out and overwritten by capitalism, sing the song everyone else is singing not because Big Brother has said you have to but because you genuinely like it. 

Sorry. This is getting a little too dark for a birthday present. Where was I? Oh. Yes. So, the rural country villages of “The Lottery” give way to the semi-rural town in “It’s a Good Life,” where everything is just perfect and it’s a great place to raise children and everyone’s always happy…because if they demonstrate any kind of negative or disturbing emotion that pisses off the omnipotent little boy who has a nasty habit of disappearing people who cause him momentary discomfort by ‘wishing them into the cornfield.’ Now, instead of a community sacrificing the individual, we have an individual secretly controlling an entire community. The fact that it’s a child is fascinating to me; one wonders if this is when the Cult of Life-Destroying Uberparenting actually began, and anxiety about this demand to sacrifice everything you have and are to craft the perfect life for your children started to make itself felt in American culture.  _Poltergeist_  is in a way more based on the old Gothic trope of the return/revenge of a repressed history of violence; the cookie-cutter suburb, nightmarish already really in its uniformity of design, is revealed to be haunted by evil beings because it was built on an old cemetery; instead of moving the bodies when they cleared the site for the new development, the developers just moved the headstones. So now it’s about corruption and development, and the rapid loss of sacred/public/green space to rapacious private development and the sprawl created by white flight. 

"Arcadia" introduces us to the next phase of that particular American residential nightmare. Unlike the sprawling suburb of  _Poltergeist,_ which packs as many medium-sized ranch homes into its square mileage as it can, the gated community promises a lot of house, a lot of space, and at least a veneer of individuality in terms of architecture, to its affluent clientele. It also promises to completely insulate them from the world of the non-affluent—and often from the non-white as well. You can’t even enter such a community—at least not if you’re driving a car—without permission from someone who lives there. If you’re discovered inside such a community, and you’re not one of the known and approved ‘neighbors,’ you’re presumed to be an external threat; Trayvon Martin was years in the future, but the logic that led Zimmerman to stalk him and shoot him was already in place in the gated communities of the 1990s. The gated community began as white flight carried to its logical extreme: a fortress defending the rich not only from crime and poverty but often from taxation and other inconveniences associated with municipal government. The homogenized “aesthetically pleasing” exterior enforced by the rules is intended to keep up a particular standard of taste associated with WASP culture and Yuppie money. It represents, to me—I won’t say  _everything_ that’s wrong with post-1980s America, but a lot of it. Self-absorption, empty materialism, racism latent or active (the bad-old-days ancestor of the gated community’s “Contracts, Covenants, & Restrictions” is the “restrictive covenants” once used to keep desirable neighborhoods all-white), and a relentless preference for a kind of bland and colorless positivity over anything emotionally/intellectually/sensually exciting. 

So this is how I feel about gated communities…and it’s obviously also how “Arcadia” feels about them, because everything about this episode conveys that. The pristine empty house with its tastefully neutral walls; the fixed smiles of the supernaturally chipper “neighbors;” the pseudo-individualized designs of the McMansions; the way that every single automobile driven by every single resident is a huge gas-guzzling planet-frying SUV; the extraordinary life-or-death importance attached to trivial details which matter only because they help maintain an “aesthetically pleasing” exterior which maintains the class status that gives the homes their actual monetary value; the complete lack not only of people of color but of color, period. Though he’s only on screen for a few minutes, I have tremendous affection for Mr. Klein, who is clearly chafing under this tyranny of niceness, and who recognizes that there is something psychotic about this community’s fanaticism regarding matters of taste. His gesture of defiance in putting up the woodchopper doohickey is later echoed by Mulder’s deliberately provocative posting of the pink flamingo in the Kleins’ front yard: “Bring it on!”

And this brings us to Mulder and Scully.

Obviously forcing them to pose as a ‘normal’ young married couple is intended to be a joke. It is pursued on several levels, and some of them are stupid and annoying. The low point for me is the scene where they’re getting ready for bed, and Mulder and Scully get into stereotypical men-are-from-Mars women-are-from-Venus bickering: the tube of toothpaste, the toilet seat, etc. The joke is supposed to be that marriage sucks the “thrill” out of any relationship, even this one: now that they’re cohabitating, there’s no more sexual tension or romantic frisson, just mutual irritation with each other’s annoying domestic habits. It’s annoying to me because it doesn’t actually fit with their overall characterization at all. They’ve shared how many goddamn motel rooms at this point—doesn’t Scully know how Mulder squeezes a tube of toothpaste? Isn’t she probably pretty used to his toilet seat habits? Why would they be bickering about it now, just because they’re in a bigger house? I also find it irritating how Mulder is constantly using the couple pretext as an excuse to touch Scully in ways she’s clearly not comfortable with, but can’t object to without blowing her cover. 

But some of it is better; and characteristically, I guess, most of the good stuff is created more by the performances than the actual writing. For instance, the touching thing. Mulder is all over that at the beginning of the episode, but as Scully gets increasingly fed up with it she finds ways of pushing him back; I love the little moment at the dinner party when she’s getting up to go help walk Scruffy and Mulder tries to cop a hug and she just air-kisses him and walks off. I also love the moment at which, after the welcome brigade has disappeared, they turn to each other and Mulder says, “Let’s get it on,” and they just start breaking out the latex gloves.

What I like about this joke is that it underscores the fact that although nothing is easier than imagining Mulder and Scully as lovers, this kind of ‘normal’ married life—big house, suburb, kids no doubt on the way—is actually totally wrong for them. If Scully or Mulder had ever wanted this kind of life individually they wouldn’t have ever met. Mulder’s entire personality is oppositional and anti-normative, and although Scully does want children she doesn’t want any of this dating/marrying/homebuying bullshit. She and Mulder are attracted to each other in the first place—as friends, as lovers, or as whatever—because they’re both weird and they’re both pretty sure that surface appearances don’t tell you much, that security is always an illusion, and that wealth in and of itself is not something that has anything to do with real happiness or satisfaction. They belong in the basement office and in that dive of an apartment Mulder maintains, scrutinizing the center from the margins. And they know that; and so while this cover setup creates a certain amount of awkwardness, for the same reason it’s also always reminding them of what they share.

Mulder says that Scully “fits right in here,” but that’s obviously a lie; her Laura Petrie persona is pretty different from her normal one and you can see that it’s a real strain for her to maintain it. What she has to do to pass as one of these happy housewives is probably constantly reminding her of why she went into medicine in the first place. But Mulder is certainly worse at passing. He enjoys the performance ironically in the early stages, and that helps him keep it up; but it doesn’t take him too long to get tired of that, and it’s but a hop skip and a jump from “every community has its dark underbelly” to the pink flamingo of rebellion. I love the stakeout sequence for that one moment when, desperately needing to pee but afraid to take his eye off the lawn for a moment, he glances at the empty orange juice carton and seriously considers peeing into it. Stay classy, Mulder!

In the end, I guess, I also like it that although there is some resolution and justice in the death of Mr. Gogolak, Mulder and Scully’s rebellion against The Falls at Arcadia is ultimately unsuccessful. Because that’s the American story: no matter how dark it gets, no matter who has to bleed, no matter what kind of suffering has to be glossed over and repressed, the American Nightmare represented in the gated community survives. It remains desirable; it remains valuable; and so it remains, period, no matter how many bodies are buried inside the circle completed by those wrought-iron gates. Mulder’s gleeful fuck-you to the CC&Rs with the backhoe—“It’s a reflecting pool, you’ll love it, it’s very tranquil”—warms my heart , and no doubt the hearts of all of us who had to grow up weird in suburbs where there was a high premium placed on normal and one never knew, until one went too far, exactly how high a price you would have to pay for breaking the unwritten rules. But it’s gonna take more than one man with a backhoe to uproot the nastiness out of which The Falls at Arcadia sprouted.





End file.
